The High Desert Museum is keeping a steady pressure on an issue close to many hearts: the importance of Earth’s non-human creatures and their increased endangerment. “Rick Bartow: Animal Kinship,” the third in the museum’s yearlong series on the subject, features art by the late Bartow, a member of the Mad River Band of the Wiyot Tribe. He was born in 1946, in Newport, Oregon, served in Vietnam, played music and wrote songs, and was a leader in Native American art. Two- and three-dimensional works make up this show, which focuses on the last three decades of Bartow’s career. Were raptors his spirit bird, one wonders? A kestrel by Bartow bursts with life. His mediums ranged widely—acrylics, watercolors, graphite, colored pencils, chainsaws, sanding. “It’s a matter of making marks,” Bartow said a year before he died, in 2016. “It’s physical work—whatever I have to get at it, to get it in there, to make that mark.” —Laura Jacobs